by A. J. Jacobs
So there’s Engels for you—the ultimate limousine liberal. It reminded me of this guy I knew in college. He was an avowed manifesto-quoting communist, but his dad was some fancy Washington lobbyist. You could just tell this guy grew up in an enormous house filled with Latin American domestics and an intercom system to connect the various wings. When I first visited his dorm room, I remember complimenting him on his lovely colossal poster of Vladimir Lenin. He thanked me, then told me how proud he was of the frame he had selected—it was mahogany, if I recall correctly. A professionally framed poster of Lenin. For the same price he could have bought three tractors for a Minsk turnip farm.
In Engels’s case, though, his ability to live with a surreal contradiction worked out nicely. If Engels wasn’t a corporate drone by day, he wouldn’t have had the cash to send to that moocher Marx. Without his allowance, Marx wouldn’t have had the time to formulate his revolutionary theories, Russia might never have gone communist, and Warren Beatty would never have written the screenplay for Reds. So the Britannica has taught me that hypocrisy can be effective. Of course, it might have been better if Engels hadn’t endorsed a totally flawed social system, but you can’t have everything.
Enigma
“Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was first broken by the Poles in the early 1930s.” See? The Poles aren’t so dumb. Another stereotype busted by the Britannica. (A stereotype, by the way, is a printing plate. I never knew that one).
eraser
Good thing I didn’t take more ecstasy during my college years. I need all the brain cells I have. This became apparent during a conversation with Julie a couple of days after our party. She asked me how I was liking the Hanukkah present she had given me.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one at your office.”
I blanked. A Hanukkah present I brought to work? What the hell was it? My mind is so packed with bauxite formations and Cameroonian cities and 19th-century composers that it’s elbowing out everything else in my life.
“I’m loving it!” I said.
But I gave myself away with that two-second delay.
“You don’t know what it is, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What?”
“Um, a Frisbee?” I guessed.
She laughed—which was a relief.
“You got too much in your keppe.”
Turned out it was an aromatherapy candle that smelled like grass. And I was liking it quite a bit—that much I remembered.
It’s not just Hanukkah gifts I’m forgetting. It’s my beloved facts. The new ones are pushing out the old ones. Here’s a demoralizing story: Back in the early Es, I read about the scientist who pioneered the study of how humans forget information over time; he invented a curve to describe the phenomenon. When I read that entry, I said to myself, I’m going to make an effort not to forget this man’s name.
Well, yesterday—about two weeks after I’d made that vow—I tried to remember his name. I couldn’t come up with it. I knew it was an E name, but nothing else. Ironic, no? I looked in my notes and figured it out. It’s Ebbinghaus. Hermann Ebbinghaus and his famous “forgetting curve.”
I said before that I was remembering a lot more than I thought I would. That’s true. But I’m also forgetting a lot more. This seems paradoxical, but you have to understand—I just didn’t grasp the huge cubic volume of information I’d be ingesting. So I both remember more and forget more than I anticipated. There’s that much information.
But man, what a world I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten more than many people have learned their whole lives. I’ve forgotten a small stadium of historical figures. I’ve forgotten a couple of zoos’ worth of animals. I’ve forgotten a continent’s worth of towns, and equations to fill a thousand blackboards.
Of course, forgetting is not a black-and-white issue. The information doesn’t suddenly disappear like a pencil marks under an eraser (which, incidentally, is made of rubber, pumice, vegetable oil, and sulfur). It doesn’t vaporize in a flash of gunpowder. It fades like the color of a sofa in the sun. So I’m left with hundreds of half facts, missing a correct detail here, a name there.
I remembered that the author of Peter Pan had an unconsummated marriage, but I couldn’t tell you the asexual man’s name. I remember the publisher of some magazine built a secret subway underneath New York sometime in the 1800s—but which magazine? I remember that there’s a movie where the actor playing an Egyptian pharaoh wore sneakers, but which movie? Don’t know. (It was The Ten Commandments—I just looked it up in the anachronism section.)
ethical relativism
This I knew about. I discovered ethical relativism way back in high school. I had been reading something pretentious—perhaps Roland Barthes, maybe a logical positivist of some sort—and I unearthed this amazing truth: there is no such thing as absolute morals! I’ve since come to believe that teenagers and profound philosophical doctrines are a bad mix, as dangerous as nitroglycerin and kieselguhr (Alfred Nobel’s original recipe for dynamite). And this philosophical doctrine practically exploded in my face, leading to an absurd and humiliating moment in my career as a young know-it-all.
It was my senior year at Dalton, the New York private school I attended from kindergarten on up to graduation. You may remember Dalton from its not-so-flattering cameo in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. It was the school where Mariel Hemingway’s 17-year-old character studied algebra before going home to have sex with Woody’s character, who was about eighty-three at the time. I don’t believe that too many of the girls in my Dalton class were having sex with eighty-three-year-olds after school, though if they were, it would help explain why none of them ever had sex with me. In any case, Dalton is a very hoity-toity institution, attracting the offspring of lawyers and bankers and the occasional celebrity. (Robert Redford’s daughter! Jonas Salk’s niece!) And thanks to its embarrassingly large endowment, the academics were demanding.
Such was the case with my senior year physics course, which I took with my friend Nick Panetti. Since I was marginally better at physics than Nick—who admittedly wasn’t going to be the next Heisenberg—I decided to let him cheat off my exam. Which wasn’t smart to begin with. But then I made things much, much worse by committing a stupid error: I wrote “f = m + a” instead of the more traditional (if slightly clichéd) equation “f = ma.” Nick duplicated my error. As we used to say back then, we were so busted.
The head of the high school—a pudgy bearded guy who pretended to be loosey-goosey and liberal, but who was actually a total hard-ass—scheduled a meeting with me and my parents for the next day. I went home and spent several hours scribbling a three-page, single-spaced, brilliantly reasoned defense. My argument boiled down to this: all morality is relative. I have my own moral system. In my moral system, letting Nick cheat off my exam was not wrong. Therefore what I did was not wrong. Therefore the Dalton School cannot punish me. QED.
In preparation for our meeting, I presented my argument to my parents. You know, just to see if they had any little suggestions. “And therefore,” I read to them off my yellow legal pad, doing my best to speak from the diaphragm, “the Dalton School has no philosophical grounds on which it can punish me. You must let me go.”
I looked up. My dad’s face was very stern. Even my mom—who almost always supported me, who loved to boast about my brilliance, who knew I was special ever since I mastered that Tonka dump truck before any of my classmates—even Mom seemed unhappy with me. Her face was scrunched up, as if she’d just wandered into a big patch of arales (a flowering plant that emits a fetid odor that attracts flies).
“I think that’s a very bad idea,” said my dad. “Just go in there and say you’re sorry.”
“No, I’m saying this. It’ll work. Trust me.”
I brought the notes for my speech to the meeting with the administrator. But as I studied his unsmiling face and listened to his le
cture on the honor code, I began to suspect my parents were right. It would take more than a well-organized five-minute speech on ethical paradigms to radically alter his moral philosophy. And if I decided to try, I might well find myself applying for educational opportunities at high schools not featured in Woody Allen movies. So instead, the administrator got to hear how sorry I was that I let Nick cheat off my paper. Truly, awfully sorry. “It was wrong letting Nick cheat off my paper,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief at the blackness of my soul. “I’ll never do it again.”
Whenever I think of this story, I’m always amazed at my initial level of delusion. Nowadays, I know that beautifully crafted philosophical arguments will not get you out of trouble at work, get you a raise, or land you a table at Nobu. And if I were that bearded administrator today, it sure wouldn’t work on me. Ethical relativism—even if I still clung to it intellectually in the years that followed—has little impact on my postschool life.
Reading the Britannica, though, had an odd effect on me: it actually made me much less of an ethical relativist. I had a vague idea from high school and college that I shouldn’t be judging other cultures, especially preliterate ones. They have their own customs, and who are we to critique them with our biased Western eyes? A few thousand pages of the Britannica will cure you of any fuzzy idealization of preliterate societies. I’ve read about culture after culture with traditions that strike me as wrong—evil, even.
Just try to refrain from judgment when you read about, say, the customs of the Native American Kutchin people. When a Kutchin girl had her first menstruation, she was sent to live for a year in a special shelter away from the tribe, wore a pointed hood that forced her to look down at the ground, had a rattle that prevented her from hearing anything, carried a special stick if she wanted to scratch her head, and had a special cup that could not touch her lips. No doubt in my mind. That’s not only crazy, it’s just wrong.
I’ve even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn’t 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man’s widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British imperialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good.
Etruscan alphabet
Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line—right-to-left, then left-to-right. Brilliant! The eye doesn’t waste time trekking back to the left side of the page after every line. If the Britannica were written boustrophedon style, I’d be in the Fs by now.
eunuchs
Julie’s not pleased with the Britannica. She had a few minutes to spare and decided to see what it had to say about her favorite movie star, Tom Cruise. She slid out the C volume and found the answer: nothing.
“What kind of business is this?” she says, pointing to a page with illustrator George Cruikshank and a cruise missile. “No Tom Cruise? He’s had a huge impact on our culture. Huge.”
“They’re a little light on the pop culture,” I say.
“Weird,” she says.
What about one of her favorite musicians, George Harrison? She got out the Hs, to discover that the Beatle didn’t rate his own entry either—though there was a nice write-up of George Harrison, noted church organ designer from the 19th century. He’s a musician too, in his own way.
“That’s a weird book you got there,” she says.
The Britannica may seem a little peculiar in its choices at times. But the good news is, once you’ve read several thousands of its pages, you get a sense of what it takes to get behind these velvet ropes. I’m proud to say I’ve cracked the code. And as a service to you, the reader, here are the ten best ways to get your own entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
1. Get beheaded. This is perhaps the surest path to getting written up. The Britannica loves nothing more than a person—preferably a noble one—who has had his or her neck chopped in two. One of my favorite games involves reading a biographical squib that begins with the words “French revolutionary” and then guessing how many years it takes before he finds himself under the guillotine.
2. Explore the Arctic. It helps if you can go on an ill-fated expedition, but pretty much any Arctic adventuring will do. If you travel anywhere north of Banff, you’ll get a careful look from the Britannica editorial committee.
3. Write some poems. Surrealist and Russian formalist poets are especially welcome, but almost anyone who has ever written a quatrain or rhymed more than a dozen words seems to get into the club. At times, it gets almost as absurd as an early Paul Bowles poem. A two-page spread in the early Bs that is only slightly atypical features no less than three of ’em: Carl Bellman, Andres Bello, and Hilaire Belloc—a Swedish poet, a Chilean poet, and a good old Anglo-French poet.
4. Become a botanist. Scandinavian ones seem particularly popular. Also, the study of mosses and peat deposits shouldn’t be underestimated.
5. Get yourself involved in commedia dell’arte. The Britannica’s obsession with the Italian 18th-century comedies borders on the unhealthy. The EB has great enthusiasm for commedia dell’arte actors, whether they happened to play the pretentious but cowardly soldier Capitano, the saucy maid Columbine, or the madcap acrobat Zanni.
6. Win the Nobel Prize. Economics, physics, peace—the category’s not important, as long as you’ve got the medal.
7. Get castrated (men only). If you’re really committed, the word “eunuch” is a good thing to have on your résumé. And don’t despair, just because you have lost a pretty important source of testosterone, it doesn’t mean you’ll be powerless. On the contrary. Maybe it’s a compensation thing, but many of these eunuchs over the years have had impressive clout. Like Bagoas, a Persian minister in the 4th century B.C., who led an army in conquering Egypt, looted the temples, made a fortune, killed the king, killed the king’s sons, then tried to poison the new ruler he appointed, only to be forced to drink the poison himself. A good run while it lasted.
8. Design a font. Apparently, coming up with a new typeface is a more impressive feat than I had previously thought. The Britannica especially likes controversial typefaces that are initially dismissed haughtily, only to be revived later and recognized as brilliant, like Baskerville, designed by font hero John Baskerville.
9. Become a mistress to a monarch (ladies only). This seems a pleasant and painless way to get in. If I were a woman, I’d start working on that as soon as possible, since there are fewer and fewer monarchs every day.
10. Become a liturgical vestment. I know this is easier said than done, but since every garment ever worn by a religious figure gets a nice picture, I thought I’d throw it in, just in case.
Ezekiel
The biblical prophet Ezekiel ate a scroll to symbolize his appropriation of its message. Now, that’s a committed reader. Maybe I should eat the entire encyclopedia to symbolize my appropriation of its message, but I don’t think my stomach would react well to the leatherette covers.
I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as snack. It’s the literal version of the metaphor linking eating and reading—he’s a voracious reader, he devours books, he’s hungry for knowledge, et cetera. It rings true to me. After my four-hour reading stints each morning, I feel like I’ve stuffed my mind full of very rich food, like a Thanksgiving dinner for my head every day. I wish that I could unbutton the pants around my brain and let out my cerebral cortex a little.
I’m wondering if—to continue Ezekiel’s metaphor—I bit off more than I can chew when I announced this Britannica project to the world. Because I have to tell you, I’m not sure I can go on. I’m not sure I can hear another one of those tissue-thin pages crinkle whil
e turning. Or see another black-and-white picture of an old man with elaborate facial hair. Or learn about the average cubic meters of water discharged by another African river. Or crack open another volume with a spine emblazoned with the Scottish thistle—a plant with sharp thorns that serves as Britannica’s weird-looking and aggressive logo. Why exactly did I think this was a good idea again?
F
fable
JULIE AND I spend the afternoon at my mom and dad’s apartment. They’re throwing a brunch for their friends, and we’ve been invited to have some smoked turkey and try to make a good impression. I sit on the couch next to their friend, a lawyer named Bob. When he learns about my project, he tells me an encyclopedia-themed fable. I haven’t heard too many of those, so I’ll repeat it here.
“Did you hear about the Middle Eastern potentate?” he asked me. “This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, ‘I want you to gather all the world’s knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn.’ The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate looked at it and he said, ‘No. It’s too long. Make it shorter.’ So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume. The potentate looked at it and said, ‘No. Still too long.’ So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was?”
Bob looked at me. I shook my head.
“The sentence was: ‘This too shall pass.’”
Bob paused, let it sink in. “I heard that when I was very young and it has always stuck with me.”
It’s a good story. And it’s some good wisdom, too: “This too shall pass.” So far, the Britannica has backed that sentiment up. The Black Plague passed, the Hundred Years War passed, the vogue for codpieces passed. Maybe Bob’s sentence is, in fact, the secret of life. I wonder if I’ll be able to come up with anything better by the end of my journey. What will be my mind-blowing one-sentence distillation of all knowledge? René Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes? The French had not only canned laughter, but canned weeping? Needs some work.